VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery

What a day again, and it’s actually not finished cause within a couple of minutes the VMworld Europe 2009 party will start.

The VMTN Experts session was actually, in my opinion, pretty good today. We had way more people coming over that were asking questions or just came over to have a chat with one of the Experts! With the vExperts being announced this morning there was a good atmosphere, even Statler and Waldorf euuuh Boche and Laverick were having fun. For those on twitter and those who have been following the story about VMDougs snuggie, check the video Gabe published, lol.

Now today I did one of the labs together with Eric Sloof, Data Recovery. There are a couple of write-ups on the product for instance this one by VM-Aware so I’m going to write about all the features and scheduling possibilities. One thing I’ve noticed no one writing about is that the Appliance actually uses the hot-add feature which is part of VCB. So basically what happens when you do a backup:

1. Create a snapshot of disk(s)
2. Hot add disk(s) to Data Recovery appliance
3. Create hashes of (hopefully variable) blocks
4. Read data of changed blocks
5. Dedupe(using variable chunk sizes) and create hash
6. Store data
7. Remove hot add disk(s)
8. Remove snapshot

So this is what I’m guessing will happen cause I actually haven’t seen the documentation, but it makes sense in my opinion.. The cool thing about this way of running backups is that doesn’t really matter if you do a full backup or do an incremental/differential it’s always small because of the deduplication. Full backup it is! Although some blogs aren’t sure yet, it will contain file level restore in the future!

By using the hot add mode it’s a LAN free backup, all I/O is being handled by the ESX Server I/O stack. This will however cause overhead on the ESX Server so you might not want to start 20 backups on the same host. Also keep in mind that the deduplication will be rather CPU intensive so this might also slow down the process if you run multiple backups. The deduplication is “inline” by the way which means that the data will be deduped before it will be written to disk.

Now there’s more to write about, and especially about the Cloud Plugin that has been demoed today… But I really need to get ready for the VMworld party called “Cloud9” this year! See you guys in a few minutes 🙂 and for those that didn’t come to Cannes, please join John Troyer tonight(wednesday) at the weekly podcast and remind him he’s really missing out on this! 😛